If there is one thing Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine wanted to make clear at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday, it is this: He isn't The Godfather of venture capital.

"I did not come a thousand miles to be here from Montana only to be identified with a major criminal," Valentine said early in a wide-ranging interview of him and Tom Perkins, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "The godfather is not an image that I hope my grandchildren recognize."

OK. So he's the "grandfather of venture capital," not The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola take note, in case you want to make a movie about where the bodies are buried on Sand Hill Road.

Both started their highly influential venture firms in 1972. Some of Sequoia's big hits since then have been Apple, Atari and Cisco. Kleiner Perkins big investments include Genentech, AOL, Google and Amazon.

Much like a chat with your grandfather, the discussion with Perkins and Valentine covered many topics in no particular order, with the following interesting nuggets of history emerging:

— Kleiner Perkins didn't do so well at the start: "We made some really funny, but stupid, investments," Perkins said of the early work by him and co-founder Eugene Kleiner. "I will confess the worst one we did was an idea to convert a motorcycle into a snowmobile. It was called, I’m not making this up, Snow-Job. I spent a couple days on it up in the Sierras and I thought it was just terrific. But the customers didn’t jump for it."

— No. 1 in Kleiner Perkins' anti-portfolio? Passing on Apple: "Kleiner and I had looked at about three kit computer companies," Perkins said. "We were very unimpressed. We very foolishly didn’t even look at Steve (Jobs) and (Steve) Wozniak. Big mistake."

— The view from someone who took a meeting with Jobs and invested: "Without exaggeration I would say that every meeting with Steve was a showstopper," Valentine declared. "At age 18, undegreed, and not the technical side of Apple — that was Wozniak — Jobs was able to craft questions that got to the heart of whatever the problem was and exploit the deficiency in the competitor’s product as well as employ the best and most technically developed Silicon."

— Not afraid of hot water: "The thing that was distinctive about Atari board meetings was they were conducted in a hot tub, with all of the directors dressed appropriately for a hot tub," recalled Valentine of the computer game company that was Sequoia's first funding. "It was in Nolan Bushnell’s house and he was a very thoughtful founder. He had some bad wine floating around in the hot tub in case refreshment was required. This is a world that had a lot of humor involved and opportunities to do things differently. I’ve always believed that the key to making great investments was to assume that the past is wrong and to do something that’s not part of the past, to do something entirely differently."

— Did you say HR? I hate that word: "The last person you want to hire in a startup is an HR person," Valentine said, looking like he had tasted something bad. "They are the destroyers of companies. They’re the one that write the binders and tell you what the rules are and how much everybody gets paid in Grade 7. Wozniak tried to be hired by Hewlett-Packard but Woz didn’t look to HR at HP like somebody there was supposed to look and was therefore unemployable."

— Good people vs. good ideas: There has always been a debate about whether you invest in people or ideas," Perkins said. "I have always invested in ideas because bad people don’t have good ideas. I had a simple formula. I would always look at the back pages at the numbers and if they were big I would look at the front pages and see what kind of business it was."

— Why he won't invest in companies started by Harvard or Stanford MBAs: "I’m very discriminate. I’m against all business schools," was Valentine's simple explanation.

— Do it yourself: "Start the company by yourself because you are not going to get great people to work for a high-risk startup," Perkins advised. "Get it going yourself with the help of a good venture capitalist and then build your team."